Snowfall, with Reconciliation
After Dein Haus ritt die finstere Welle (Your House Rode the Dark Wave) by Anselm Kiefer, which is after Das einzige Licht (The Only Light) by Paul Celan
I.
How old winter is.
However much we stain
the world, snow thick
as flaking plaster falls.
Everything imitates
this act. The grey art of
ambiguity. A strenuous ballet
of wet feet, wet cuffs. Sometimes
language impedes such croaks
of sorrow. Our long verb, howl.
The soul-catcher’s noose,
murmuring judgments.
II.
Something overripe malingers
without benefits of bone.
I too haltingly assay
an orderly universe
of discoverable laws.
The deep woods drumming
of the grouse. Last night’s
dream. The intensity of it.
All of us on all fours obeying
the laws of migration.
III.
Who stands outside the self?
Anyone who dares to disbelieve.
Out of what reservoir makes time?
The piece I came to grief on.
Did I come back from there
morally improved?
Age has conferred on me
a certain grace.
IV.
Here’s such light and such benevolence
that winter is overlooked, like bad
table manners. Such concentration
is required. I look for you wherever I go,
thin line of comfort that binds us.
Anchored at the window, the last
to leave, I tell the lie that saves:
I am your first forgiver. I will be
years gathering up our words.
The one brief note that says
we mean to save that kind
of boldness: ripe berry on the stem.
V.
Now we are new round mouths,
up at dawn to perform the simple tasks.
We will butter the sun with our wisdom,
all delicate with touch and praise.
I hope in the afterlife there’s love
leaking out unguarded.
A Maxine Kumin ekocento written in the Maxine Kumin Studio, Vermont Studio Center
Source poems: “After Love;” “Chores;” “Family Reunion;” “Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins;” “Cross Country Skiing;” “The Festung, Salzburg;” “The Archaeology of a Marriage;” “The Eternal Lover;” “Finding the One Brief Note;” “A Calling;” “The Excrement Poem;” “The Geographic Center;” “Getting There;” “In a Different Country;” “Last Days;” “Grandchild;” “In April, In Princeton;” “Lying in Bed Away from Home;” “Night Launch;” “My Quotable Friend;” “One Dead Friend;” “Requiem on I-89;” “Song;” “With the Caribou;” “Youth Orchestra, with Dogs;” “Together;” “Song for Seven Parts of the Body;” “The Revisionist Dream;” “The Poets’ Garden;” “Heaven as Anus;” “In the Absence of Bliss;” “Marianne, My Mother, and Me;” “Nurture;” “’Primitivism’ Exhibit;” “Running Away Together;” “The Spell;” “Whereof the Gift Is Small;” “Which One;” “Spree;” “The Selling of the Slaves;” “Progress;” “On Reading an Old Baedeker in Schloss Leopoldskron;” “The Masochist;” “The Knot;” “How It Is”
